Not for Sale: Your name and clinical curiosity

There is an uncomfortable business model emerging in digital medicine.

A physician searches for a disease, looks up a treatment, reads about a new therapy or explores a difficult clinical question. To the physician, these are ordinary acts of learning and patient care.

To someone else, they can be valuable commercial signals. A search for multiple myeloma may suggest that an oncologist is treating a patient with myeloma. Repeated interest in a disease may indicate a prescribing opportunity. When that activity can be connected to an individual physician, clinical curiosity becomes commercially valuable data.

We think that's a topic worth discussing.

Your clinical questions shouldn't become sales leads

There are legitimate reasons for industry to understand physicians. They need to know whether clinicians understand new data, where educational gaps exist, which treatments are being adopted and what barriers prevent appropriate use. Aggregated information can answer many of these questions.

But there's an important difference between understanding physicians as a group and monitoring an individual physician.

If an oncologist starts researching a particular disease, should that become a signal that they're ready to prescribe a particular drug? If a physician repeatedly explores one treatment, should that behavior become part of an individual commercial profile?

Our answer is no.

Incentives matter

Imagine a physician researching treatment options for a patient with multiple myeloma. There are several reasonable therapies.

Now imagine that the platform knows exactly what the physician is researching and can monetize that moment. What determines which treatment gets placed in front of the physician? The evidence? Clinical relevance? An experienced myeloma specialist? Or whoever is willing to pay the most?

Advertising isn't inherently wrong. Industry has a legitimate role in educating physicians about approved therapies. But the closer advertising gets to an individual clinical decision, the more important it becomes to understand the incentives behind what the physician sees.

The most valuable moment for an advertiser is precisely when a physician most needs an unbiased answer.

Physicians need a space to ask questions freely

Sometimes the question is basic. Sometimes you're exploring a treatment you've never used. Sometimes you're reconsidering something you thought you knew. That's part of being a good doctor.

A medical knowledge platform shouldn't make you wonder who knows what you searched, whether that activity is being attached to your identity, or whether what you're seeing is there because it's clinically relevant or because someone paid for it.

Trust matters.

We choose a different path

Industry develops many of the therapies our physicians use, and their support can help make high-quality medical education freely available to clinicians around the world.

But sponsorship doesn't mean everything is for sale.

Open Medicine will never sell individual physician data to industry.

Not what you search for.

Not which algorithms you read.

Not which therapies you explore.

Not which clinical questions you're trying to answer.

And we will never turn an individual physician's activity on Open Medicine into a commercial lead for industry. That is a red line.

There is a better way

Pharma doesn't need to know that Dr. Smith searched for multiple myeloma yesterday to learn something useful. We can identify educational gaps, understand which clinical questions generate uncertainty, measure how resources are being used and share meaningful insights at an aggregated level without turning individual physicians into the product.

Open Medicine was created so physicians could share what they know with other physicians, for the benefit of patients. Our network only works if we trust each other.

There will always be another dataset someone wants to buy and another way to monetize physician attention. But we will not sell our soul.

Your clinical curiosity belongs to you. It should never be for sale.